A SHORT HISTORY

For a generation, like weather cocks,
their skeletons swung near the highway.
James Price and Thomas Brown had robbed the Mail.
Years turned. The Gowy flooded and the heath
flowered. Travellers noted the bones
hanging in chains by the Warrington road.
Justices ordered the gibbet removed,
the remains disposed of. In Price’s skull,
while Napoleon was crossing the Alps
or Telford building bridges or Hegel
defining Historical Necessity
or Goya painting Wellington’s portrait,
a robin made its nest.

3 Responses

Laura Phillips

The website’s a great thing – looks and user-friendliness and most importantly I felt privileged to be delving into your thoughts through your poetry.

I’m not really a poetry reader, in that I don’t think to read it and so being given the opportunity was thoroughly enjoyable – thank you!

A SHORT HISTORY (in FEATURED POEMS) was my favourite – a snapshot and yet covering many years, broad and yet local and encouraging me to think about greatness and great deeds alongside local life and lives cut short. Magic.

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NOTICE – I, DAVID JOHN BERNARD SELZER, hereby assert and give notice of my right under section 77 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patented Act 1988 to be identified as the author of all works presented within this website.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS – Some of the poems on the website have appeared, in one form or another, in the following: A Jar Of Sticklebacks, Anglo-Welsh Review, Jabberwocky, Life Lines, Peterloo Anthology, Poetry in the Seventies, Poetry Matters. Poetry Merseyside, Meridian, Still Life, The Honest Ulsterman and the Times Literary Supplement. Some have been broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside. HERRINGS was performed at Action Transport Theatre in 2005.